Programs and Tours

Ken Chen & Ravi Shankar Poetry Reading

Ken Chen is the executive director of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. His first poetry collection, Juvenalia, won the 2010 Yale Younger. Other work has been published or recognized in Best American Essays 2006, Best American Essays 2007, and The Boston Review of Books. A graduate of Yale Law School, he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Ravi Shankar’s collections of poetry include Instrumentality, a finalist for the 2005 Connecticut Book Awards; the collaborative chapbook Wanton Textiles, with Reb Livingston; and Deepening Groove, winner of the National Poetry Review Prize. Shankar has received numerous honors and awards for his work, including a Pushcart Prize and fellowships from the MacDowell Colony and the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. He is founding editor and executive of director of the online arts journal Drunken Boat, one of the oldest electronic arts journals on the web. With Tina Chang and Nathalie Handal he co-edited the anthology Language for a New Century: Contemporary Poetry from the Middle East, Asia, and Beyond (2008). Chairman of the Connecticut Young Writers Trust, Shankar is associate professor at Central Connecticut State College and a faculty member of the first international MFA program at City University of Hong Kong.

UMMA is pleased to be the site for the Zell Visiting Writers Series, which brings outstanding writers each semester. The Series is made possible through a generous gift from UM alumna Helen Zell (’64). For more information, please see www.lsa.umich.edu/english/grad/mfa/mfaeve.asp.